Well Healed: Can Clothing Cure?

A new wave of fashion is weaving healing properties into the very fabric of the designs. From Victoria Beckham’s ‘crystal alchemy’ and Viktor & Rolf’s ‘color magic’ to Ayurvedic dyes and shoes that ‘earth’ you to the planet, Vogue Paris checks out the medicinal possibilities on offer.

“What a strange power there is in clothing,” Nobel Prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once mused. It’s true, isn’t it? We all know the transformative abilities of a precision-tailored trouser suit to straighten the posture, a nipped-in waist or a flippy hem to make you feel feminine, or your favorite heels (the ones you can actually walk in) to put a runway-worthy spring in your step. In short, we know fashion can give us a good dose of self-confidence – but increasing numbers of designers are also looking more closely than ever at what lies within those threads. From materials that tap into your spiritual side to fabrics using tech to improve how they interact with your skin – and their impact on the planet – VogueParis meets the designers blazing a trail in this innovative fashion field.

For Kitx, a sustainably focused Australian label founded by Kit Willow Podgornik (and favored by eco-chic actor Emma Watson), conscious, ‘healing’ fashion is something we can literally wear on our sleeve. The designer uses ancient Ayurvedic recipes from southern India to dye her fabrics, infusing her garments with antibacterial properties. For the resort 2019 collection, which she showed in Paris in October, the designer worked with independent Indian dye house The Colours of Nature, based outside Tamil Nadu. It was her second time working with the initiative. “They recovered this old recipe book of dying; our beige is from jackfruit, yellow is from marigold, and our red is from a plant [called] rubiacordifolia. I love the idea of going back to nature – and using it to create colors with ancient practices is such a beautiful thing.” And if you haven’t experienced a Kitx creation yet, don’t imagine it’s all kaftans and harem pants; instead, think precision tailoring and luxe eveningwear, in hues with a depth of color, richness and rawness that sets this label apart.

It’s a similar story for Emily Bode – the CFDA 2018 Fashion Fund finalist whose eponymous menswear label counts Childish Gambino’s Donald Glover among its fans. “I was working with a factory in India and was coincidentally introduced to a venture that creates textiles with ‘medicinal’ qualities,” the designer explains from her New York HQ. She describes the indigo yarn she’s used, which is hand-dyed with “basil, neemandturmeric. The fabric is aromatic and is said to help with respiratory issues [and] congestion, and [to be] anti-fungal and anti-diabetic. Some of the fabrics are more heavily scented – you can still smell the basil.”

Also based in New York is natural dyer and textile designer Cara Marie Piazza, who has lent her “sartorial healing” abilities to labels including Eckhaus Latta and Loup Charmant.“The feeling of wearing something dyed with flowers can be beautiful and soothing,” she explains. “By wearing clothing that was naturally dyed and imbued with plants that have herbal and healing benefits, we can ‘absorb’ the essences of these plants through our skin. I work with a lot of plants that [have been] used as medicine. Black walnut is antimicrobial and antiseptic, and is also a form of bug repellent while indigo roots have [traditionally] been prepared as medicine used for infections such as the common cold.”

For the spiritually leaning, crystals have proved to be something of a buzz material of late. The Olsen twins handed out healing crystals to attendees at their fall/winter 2019 collection; each milliliter of Miranda Kerr’s KORA Organics skincare products is passed through a rose quartz filtration process to “cleanse” them and “harness the crystals’ powers of self-love” and **Victoria Beckham’**s pre-fall 2018 collection was scattered with jasper, tiger’s eye, white howlite, sodalite and yellow calcite; some garments were even constructed with secret pockets for the crystals.

For Los Angeles-based footwear designer Mariah Lyons and her brand Astara, venturing into “wearable wellness” was a natural progression. A former dancer, she worked as a stylist and press agent for Burberry and JimmyChoo, but found the change from the dynamism of dance to a more static office role took a noticeable toll on her body. Autoimmune issues such as joint pain led her to begin researching and soon she came upon the theory of Schumann resonances, which finds that humans separated from the Earth’s electromagnetic fields and the natural healing quality they produce begin to develop ailments. The condition is experienced by astronauts in space and led Nasa to develop a way to simulate the Earth’s vibrations to curb “space sickness”.

“We used to be outdoors and in communion with nature, but now we’re inundated by WiFi and radiation all day long,” says Lyons, a self-described “intuitive healer, herbalistandcrystal alchemist”. To that end, the soles of the shoes in her collections are fitted with metal tag technology that resonates at the same vibration as the Earth’s magnetic field – 7.83 hertz. Lyon describes the in-shoe experience as feeling like you’re barefoot in the sand or grass. “Each shoe has a different crystal on it – black onyx, clear quartz, rose quartz – and I’m doing a blue apatite forresort*. Every crystal has its own frequency and vibration, which helps people connect even more deeply to the Earth.”*

Other brands are focusing on the tech benefits of materials that naturally protect against nasties. Denmark’s Organic Basics innovated SilverTech technology – a fabric woven with fine silver threads which has antibacterial and antimicrobial properties – “to change the way people think about the clothes they put right next to their bodies," says co-founder Mads Rasmussen. “When we first started making underwear we discovered thattwo thirdsof the environmental impact of our clothingwasactually created by doing laundry. We’d been hearing about the odor-controlling effect of silver so we decided to weave it into our GOTS [Global Organic Textile Standard] organic cotton basics line to make them stay fresher for longer. More recently, we’ve started making recycled nylon activewear treated with a Bluesign®-approved [i.e. sustainable] recycled silver.” The upshot is that you can wear your bacteria-killing underwear for longer (yes really) without needing to put them through an environmentally unfriendly hot cycle.

For the future, tech labs and initiatives are already working on fabrics that purify the air around them, measure the wearer’s heartbeat, stop radiation from being absorbed and are infused with disinfectant abilities for the skin. It’s no secret that when we feel our best, we look it – and this is feel-good fashion at its finest.